Mutt and Jeff — 1908-09-16

Six horizontal panels follow the lanky, fur-clad Mutt through a preposterous claim of having discovered the South Pole. He addresses skeptical "polar experts" at a crowded table, boasts of planting the American flag, then admits he rode an ice taxi and merely carved his name in the ice. The strip closes with a deadpan chess joke. Fisher's loose, energetic line and stacked speech balloons — already confidently handling crowd scenes and rapid-fire dialogue — show the daily newspaper strip at its formative peak. *Mutt and Jeff*, launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907, is among the first strips built around a single recurring cast, its continuous daily run pioneering the serialized comic format that would directly seed the comic-book medium.